Olive Schreiner and African Modernism

Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing

Jade Munslow Ong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317388364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book works across established categories of modernism and postcolonialism in order to radically revise the periods, places, and topics traditionally associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature. The book is the first account of Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. The book draws on and broadens discussions in and around the blossoming field of global modernist studies by interrogating the conventionally accepted genealogy of development that positions Europe and America as the sites of innovation. It provides an original examination of the relationships between metaphor, postcolonialism, and modernist experimentation by showing how politically and aesthetically innovative African forms rely on allegorical structures, in contrast to the symbolism dominant in Euro-American modernism. An original theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial, Marxist, and ecocritical approaches to literature. The book provides original readings of Schreiner's three novels, Undine, The Story of An African Farm, and From Man to Man, in light of the new theory of primitivism in African literature by directly addressing the issue of narrative form. This argument is contextualised in relation to the work of other Southern African authors, in whose writings the impact of Schreiner's politics and aesthetics can be traced. These authors include J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Solomon T. Plaatje, and Zoe Wicomb, amongst others. This book brings the most current debates in modernist studies, ecocriticism, and primitivism into the field of postcolonial studies and contributes to a widening of the debates surrounding gender, race, empire, and modernism.

1 Allegory and Animals in Undine: A Queer Little Child

Introducing Undine: Intertextuality and Theories of Allegory

The main premise of this chapter is that Olive Schreiner’s Undine: A Queer Little Child (written in the 1870s) is an experimental intertext that uses older allegorical narrative forms to explore progressive political and ethical positions. This is a rather unusual claim about a text long consigned to the margins of Schreiner scholarship for both its perceived faults in story and form and discomfiting depictions of race and gender.¹ Carolyn Burdett’s comment that ‘by any reckoning, feminist or otherwise, [it] amounts to an uncomfortable plot’ seems to be confirmed by the action of the novel in which the freethinking, feminist child, Undine, relinquishes her personal and bodily freedom, economic independence, and eventually her life, for the love of cruel misogynist Albert Blair.² This doomed love plot is combined with other formally and politically problematic features, including racist descriptions of black African characters; the juxtaposition of an idealised England with a filthy, impoverished South Africa; strange coincidences; leaps of time and space; and unexplained character entrances and exits – factors that all contribute to a view of Undine as immature and unequal to the expression of radical arguments relating to gender, empire, and religion. Yet by attending to Schreiner’s characteristic allegorical techniques as a way of voicing progressive political positions, rather than focusing only on evidence taken from plot, it becomes possible to see how Undine offers a formally experimental, albeit piecemeal, critique of imperialism, restrictive interpretations of Christianity and normative gender roles in fin de siècle colonial South Africa. In this way, I try not to discount or deny the manifold ways in which Undine remains weighed down by conventional contemporary representations of women, African people and animals; but rather find ways to bring to light aspects of the text that show dissatisfaction with the limitations of nineteenth-century colonial culture.

I begin my analysis of Undine with a focus on form. The influence of Ancient Greek philosophy, fairytales, European legends and German and English Romanticism on Schreiner’s novel demonstrate her attempt to move away from English Victorian realism, and anticipate experiments in writing that would later be associated with the Euro-American modernist movement. Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy across literary movements further helps to reveal how Schreiner’s intertextual use of older allegorical tropes and structures constitutes modernist rather than realist practice. The chapter goes on to assess the relationship between form and radicalism, focusing on one of the main allegorical thrusts of Undine, which is provided by the zoomorphic human and anthropomorphic animal characters that descend from mythical, fairytale, and Ancient Greek philosophical origins. The protagonist’s metaphorically significant associations with animals facilitate the expression of freethinking, feminist and anti-imperialist ideas introduced by the novel. Undine thus undermines dominant nineteenth-century models of the primitive human or animal as less evolutionarily developed and without political platform. This can be seen as a liberating move when the novel is read in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s lectures on animals, classic feminist and postcolonial analyses of the nineteenth-century novel, and with other recent work in postcolonial ecocriticism.

My reading of Undine as innovative intertext serves two purposes. First to establish the novel as an object for literary analysis, rather than seeing it in terms of a forerunner or draft version of The Story of an African Farm, or of interest primarily for its autobiographical content; and second, to redress readings of the novel on terms that privilege realism, terms on which Undine will always fail.³ Both aims are not without challenge given that Schreiner’s own view of the novel was that it was a highly personal, juvenile piece of writing that ought to have been burnt;⁴ and the context of writing in the 1870s where realism was still the preferred mode for English-language novels - thanks in large part to Mudie’s and other libraries. Whilst recent attempts by Burdett, Tony Voss and myself to revisit the novel and position it in a cultural and literary context have pioneered the revival of Schreiner’s much-maligned text as worthy of scholarly attention, our interpretations diverge on a number of points. Voss concentrates on mapping the literary influences on Undine and positioning the novel in the context of Schreiner’s oeuvre; and Burdett persists in reading the novel as a realist text, albeit via a sophisticated examination of the relationship between the nineteenth-century realist ‘courtship plot’ and scientific debates around sexual selection.⁵ In making the case for reading Schreiner as an African modernist rather than a failed realist, I unfortunately invoke the well-trodden debate concerning realism vs. modernism. I am, however, keen to stymie this false and hackneyed opposition at this early stage by emphasising that throughout this book, the two are understood as interdependent and related, as they both seek to respond to, and represent, reality, albeit through different discursive methods. This approach seeks to account for Schreiner’s combined use of realist and modernist techniques to represent the very different realities of life in Victorian England and life in colonial South Africa. Schreiner’s own identification, in later life, as an ‘English-South African’, also serves to highlight that her work should be read in relation to two literary-historical narratives.⁶ In a fin de siècle British context, Schreiner’s writing appears at an early stage of the dissolution of realism and emergence of modernism; and in the context of African literary developments, Schreiner pioneers African modernism, a politically saturated aesthetic that precedes realism as a dominant literary form.

My argument that Undine cannot be investigated under the aegis of realism runs against a longstanding (now outdated) convention in Schreiner studies and beyond that equates realism with good writing. Gerald Monsman provides a representative example of this in his claim that:

Unfortunately, Schreiner’s actual handling of the plot echoes a host of nineteenth-century novels, from those of George Eliot to the then-popular works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant. […] Clearly, the young Schreiner cannot match the sophistication of dialogue or the clash of characters in their social relations achieved by Austen and Thackeray; and at least two-thirds of her novel barely rises above such weak and derivative narration.

[…] Too frequently the plot is muddled; scene is rendered abstractly or in clichés. Alliterations such as “silent white snow” are too pat, the images too familiar. Improbable coincidences that even Dickens would eschew are abundant (grandfather and pet monkey alike are killed off by the author for the sake of plot convenience), and the dramatic potential in the presentation of character is lost in mere summary.⁷

Betraying a preference for realism (in its most basic form) as the measure against which literature of the period should be judged, Monsman suggests that both Charles Dickens and Schreiner’s novels are faulty in style, plot and characterisation for not conforming. In making comparisons to other nineteenth-century writers as a way of highlighting the weaknesses in Schreiner’s writing, Monsman inadvertently highlights some of its strengths, as Schreiner introduces creative tension between realist and other forms as a way of moving beyond the conventions of the triple-decker novel.

Monsman’s assessment of Undine is further hampered by his failure to identify Schreiner’s key literary influences. Whilst there is evidence in Schreiner’s letters to show she had read and admired novels by George Eliot and Jane Austen (though not Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant or William Makepeace Thackeray), the question of whether she was familiar with their work before completing Undine remains in doubt. According to her lifelong friend, sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, Schreiner ‘read Mill on the Floss’ during her ‘first winter in England’ in 1881 – after abandoning Undine – though he remarks that ‘[s]he had read it years before and hadn’t cared for it’, thus introducing the possibility that Schreiner had come across the novel whilst still in South Africa.⁸ Undine does indeed share something of the spirit of Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, and it may be more than happenstance that Maggie is a diminutive of Margaret, the name of Undine’s twinned character. Yet if Schreiner’s 1883 letter to reviewer Philip Kent is to be believed, she ‘only read the Mill on the Floss for the first time the other day’, and goes on to express her admiration as follows: ‘Isn’t it splendid? I wish George Eliot was alive. I would like so to ask her to let me kiss her. That Maggie is the finest portrait of a woman’s soul that ever was painted’.⁹ Despite her very positive view of Eliot, Schreiner was keen in later life to disassociate her own style from Eliot’s realism, writing to Ellis in 1889 to explain that: ‘No human creature’s feelings could possibly be further removed with respect to my artistic work – not of course the scientific – than mine from George Elliots [sic]’.¹⁰ A more expansive statement of her aversion to traditional nineteenth-century novels is provided by Schreiner in another letter, this time to the prominent Cape liberal, John X Merriman, where she writes:

No, I have never read Stevenson, strange as it may seem I have a most peculiar antipathy to novels. I love the Mill on the Floss and Turgannieffs [sic] Fathers & Sons & a dozen others, but I think I like them because they are science or poetry, not because they are novels!!! I have often tried to analyze why it is that I have this intense horror of ordinary novels, while all folks of this age from Huxley & Darwin to servant girls find pleasure in them, & benefit too. They are so dry!¹¹

Schreiner’s ‘antipathy’ towards what she calls ‘ordinary novels’ suggests that she sought to transfigure the novel form even as she worked within it. This involved the use of older allegorical forms and integration of ideas and issues raised by non-literary and poetic works to develop the aesthetic and social value of her own literary outputs.

The evidence of the letters, in combination with knowledge of Schreiner’s adolescent reading, suggests that her most important literary influences at the time were not realist writers. Instead, significant sources for Undine included the Bible, Ancient Greek philosophy, and essays and studies by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Schreiner’s own copy of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy corroborates this, as it is inscribed with ‘Olive Schreiner Ratel Hoek, July 8/78’.¹² Another book in Schreiner’s personal library, this time Spencer’s First Principles, bears the hand of her husband, Samuel Cron Cronwright-Schreiner. He first notes that ‘It was a copy of Herbert Spencer’s First Principles that “the stranger”, in The story of an African farm is supposed to give Waldo’, and second that ‘(My own first reading of First principles was from this copy S.C.C.) She gave it to me. First read by her in 1871, when 16 years old’.¹³ This shows that Schreiner’s interest and engagement with socio-political and philosophical works became a foundational part of her literature, featuring in both African Farm, and also in Undine, which includes references to both Mill and Spencer.¹⁴

Schreiner also drew on work by English and German Romantics such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Percy Bysshe Shelley;¹⁵ Victorian poets such as Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and authors who experimented with psychological and social realism, and supernatural, fantastical or grotesque elements in their literature, such as Charlotte Brontë and Dickens.¹⁶ Importantly, what many of these texts and writers have in common is that they worked in, and/or theorised, allegorical modes. In their diachronic analysis of allegory, Rita Copeland and Peter Struck usefully observe that:

[i]n one of the great historical paradoxes, what Romantic aesthetic theory embraced in the concept of the “symbol” was nothing less than Neoplatonic allegorical thought […] they were doing nothing less than recuperating the oldest model of allegorical immanence under the aegis of what they called “symbol,” a term which they resuscitated from the Greek Neoplatonic tracts they read. […] The American Transcendentalists were beneficiaries of European Romantic thought and aesthetics, and were also avid readers of Neoplatonist philosophical writings. From these influences Ralph Waldo Emerson generated a model of the individual mind partaking of universal divine intelligence, and of the poet as inspired individual who can interpret human reality in allegorical relation to the realm of the spirit.¹⁷

Struck and Copeland pinpoint the similarities between three major allegorical traditions associated with philosophies that are grounded in the work of Plato, Romantic thought and American Transcendentalism. This is significant because Schreiner forms Undine as an allegorical novel by drawing on Romantic and Ancient Greek textual aesthetics, which were enriched with elements of Emerson’s cosmic world view communicated in his allegorical writings. Moreover, as the Bible, myths and fairytales, poetry by the Brownings, and novels by the Brontës and Dickens incorpora...